Scene and Heard: Scene's News Blog

Here's One Local Designer's Suggestion for Rebranding the Cleveland Browns

The Cleveland Indians aren't the only team in town that needs a redesign. For as long as we can remember — even before the orange was more orange — Aaron Sechrist has been talking about rebranding the Cleveland Browns. If you follow him on Twitter, you know this is true. It turns out even he got tired of hearing himself yell into the void.

"I got tired of tweeting at and about the Browns, and really the Browns in general," he says. "So I finally put some muscle behind my mouth and played around with what a new pro football team identity in Cleveland could look like with an actual chance to establish a new tradition of winning and good football."

As a lifelong Clevelander I say this with honesty and love for my city and the people in it: I believe that The Browns moved to Baltimore in 1995, re-named and re-branded; drafted and developed a handful of Hall of Fame players, won two Super Bowls over the next decade or so; and never came back home.

With complete respect to the brave players and coaches that have worked and tried their hardest within a myriad of different impossible systems to succeed, the organization that returned to Cleveland in 1999 has been, well; not good. It’s certainly not the same team that left town in 1995 and has fascinated me
in all the wrong ways since then.

That combined histories of The Browns and Ravens, coupled with a historically worst streak of losses would suggest that re-naming and branding this organization would lay the foundation for a better future of Cleveland pro football.

The conceptual new identity that I commissioned myself to design is inspired by the statues of the Guardians of Transportation that watch over the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, linking both sides of Cleveland. The statues were created in the spirit of progress in transportation.

With additional logos that cue off the Cleveland city flag as well, The Cleveland Guardians’ identity signifies progress, pride and building a bridge to new generations of fans that have been lost via decades of losing and an evolving culture.